Monday, January 10, 2011

Artificial Life Shares Biosignature With Terrestrial Cousins - Technology Review: Dorn and co did a similar kind of analysis on a system of artificial life called Avida. In this world, the building blocks of life are elements of computer code that carry out simple instructions. Connect several instructions together and you have a complex "molecule". If these molecules have a code that allows them to copy, they can reproduce.

Environmental factors such as the rate of mutation are controlled externally by computer scientists who also inject a constant stream of code that organisms can consume as they evolve. Dorn and co then compared the distribution of code in Avidian worlds before and after evolution had occurred.

It turns out, that Avidian creatures make the same kind of stamp on their environment as terrestrial organisms do on theirs. Avidians ensure that certain bits of code are preferentially selected so that they are far more common in an evolved system that in one that is starting from scratch.